He pointed to news from Thursday that the Department of Energy granted Cheniere Energy , which is building the first new export terminal for liquefied natural gas in the US in 40 years, the right to sell LNG all over the world. That’ll turn out to be big business for Cheniere because the US has such large nat-gas reserves and produces the commodity so cheaply. So much so that “it’s only a matter of time,” Cramer said, until the US reaches that top-exporter status.

Rather than use this cleaner, more plentiful fuel source, though, Cramer said, the US government apparently prefers crude oil and coal, even though the former widens our trade deficit and mining the latter “does more harm to the environment than virtually any other process for finding fuel known to man.”

And because the government doesn’t favor nat gas, US auto companies don’t either. Nor do our utilities. What we need is leadership on this issue, but there is none.

Instead, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking the opposite tack by choosing to investigate whether nat-gas shale drilling should be allowed at all, because of its potential harm to drinking water. The problem, though, is that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has been in use for 40 years without incident. Oddly, though, the EPA hasn’t chosen to attack offshore oil drilling following BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

So despite all the benefits of natural gas—it’s cleaner, cheaper, and we have tons of it—the government chooses to ignore them. Here’s what’s happening in the meantime, though: We’re still leashed to OPEC and its pricing power, and that expense trickles down to the consumer, too. Other countries are forcing their utilities to convert to nat gas, and they’ll import our stuff to do it. But our own Congress won’t incentivize nat-gas-fueled trucks, even though their oil-fueled cousins are responsible for about a quarter of the oil we import. And that cycles us right back to OPEC.

“Who would have ever thought we would see the day when America will become one of the largest exporters of a fuel that can power cars and trucks and utilities,” Cramer said, “while we stay wedded to oil for our vehicles and coal for our electricity. With this approval to export natural gas, the day is upon us.”